China's instructions on reporting on Google

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/24/AR2010032402511.html

by yanw • 16 years ago

275 164 16 years ago

It seems as if this Google-China row is indicative of a larger trend taking shape: the divorce of Western capitalist enterprises and the Chinese government. There was an article saying as much in yesterday's Wapo (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03...). It will be interesting to see how this affects other Western companies suffering under censorship issues there--I heard something about Godaddy possibly pulling out of there as well.

hubb• 16 years ago

they did pull out -- yesterday http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1216471

Estragon2• 16 years ago

Yes, it makes me very worried for the US. If it develops really bad relations with a major creditor nation, things are going to get sticky here.

gscott• 16 years ago

I believe this is different because the only thing holding up China's currency is American Bonds.

levesque• 16 years ago

One more thing for Obama to fix.

MikeCapone3• 16 years ago

We all knew they were doing this, but for some reason, reading the actual guidelines is chilling.

I can only imagine the people who wrote this and expanded lots of mental energy in trying to make sure that their propaganda/censorship plan was as airtight as possible...

va_coder2• 16 years ago

To me it's also chilling that the US owes a country like this 1 Trillion dollars in debt.

Also related, I think Google is f@$# awesome for standing up and doing what's right.

raquo4• 16 years ago

Sorry, but why is that chilling? The other way round seems like more potential trouble. upd: thanks, dsplittgerber

Locke16896• 16 years ago

When you owe someone $1 million, you have a problem. When you owe someone $1 trillion, they have a problem.

cynicalkane• 16 years ago

So what? It's not like China can call the debt.

The worst they can do is dump it on the market, whereupon banks and money managers across the globe will devour it like money-flavored hotcakes. There will be a brief market burp, and some change in USD value and interest rates, but at great fiscal expense to China.

Disclaimer: IANAT (am not a trader).

albertsun3• 16 years ago

Sovereign lending relations don't work quite the same way as they do for you or I.

breck• 16 years ago

Part of me thought it was kind of neat, in that it is so reminiscent of 1984.

kunley2• 16 years ago

There's still bunch of countries which run their affairs like that and over 20 years ago there were lots of them.

I live now in a post-communist country. I was only 15 during a transition, still I remember lots from before, like martial law, parents telling me a true version of history contrary to what grand school offered, and quite absurd information that I probably will be able to visit only a few of other countries in my life -- good it changed! I discovered later how some of my family members were really harassed for some quite minor anti-gov activities.

No wonder that Sergey Brin remembers it very clearly and refers to it.

Neon2012• 16 years ago

It's odd that certain societies don't value discovering or reporting the truth, but instead attempt to create it.

MikeCapone3• 16 years ago

Don't confuse a whole society with the people who hold power (and thus control the guys with the weapons).

ahk• 16 years ago

Unless I'm mistaken a majority of Chinese actually support their government and matters such as this are viewed through the prism of nationalism.

One could argue it's because of the education/brain-washing but the facts remain.

yters2• 16 years ago

Why don't all their high speed hackers turn against the gov, then? They have a lot of the gov's power, plus anonymity afforded by the medium of attack.

jbooth3• 16 years ago

Most people don't want the truth, they just want something that feels good to repeat to themselves.

"It's the American's fault!", "It's the Arabs' fault!", "It's the neocon's fault", "Drill baby drill", "Keep the government away from my medicare"...

aero142• 16 years ago

That is a nice list of things you don't like.

caffeine• 16 years ago

Indeed .. most people (see roback's dead comment below) have no clue what their mantras even mean.

stcredzero2• 16 years ago

Go to your public library and check out _Manufacturing Consent_. It's about how the US and its allies create it.

drunkpotato2• 16 years ago

I haven't read Manufacturing Consent, but I did try to read Hegemony or Survival. It was an exercise in frustration and ultimately I didn't finish. Chomsky, on the rare occasions when he does back up his assertions with references, almost invariably references only himself. Combine that with a bombastic style that yet still manages to be obtuse, boring, and repetitive, and it's a recipe for a disastrous book that can convince only those who are already convinced and angry and looking for an argument from authority.

It sounds like Manufacturing Consent has an interesting thesis. I would like to read more about it but preferably from someone more readable, more scholarly, and less prone to hyperbole and unsupported claims.

adrianwaj4• 16 years ago

At some point, a journalist switches from using reality to create perception and instead uses perception to create reality.

kunley2• 16 years ago

On the contrary, the freedom is something very new and fragile in our civilization, and always people had to fight it quite hard. It's our ignorance that we take freedom for granted in western societies, and staying in this comfort zone may unfortunately lead us to loosing it.

raquo4• 16 years ago

Note how it's written in a totally non-bureaucratic language. You don't need it when everyone is afraid of you. Just make sure you're understood.

va_coder2• 16 years ago

Right there's no spin, just clear instructions on stifling free speech.

Estragon2• 16 years ago

I expect that's more a function of the translation, or of how Chinese bureaucratic language works.

raquo4• 16 years ago

I can't read the "original" text in Chinese, but it is also very short. However, it could be shortened on purpose, so that the leak would be harder to track.

Frazzydee• 16 years ago

I found the other set of instructions, regarding a truck overturning & magazine's public letter, interesting.

Anybody know the source and original Chinese text? The article only says it was "issued by the 'Ministry of Truth' on March 23, 2010"

plinkplonk4• 16 years ago

wait for the Chinese Communist Party apologists to turn up and argue that "China is not yet ready for democracy" and "The Communist party is doing this to help protect the Chinese people from evil Western imperialists" any moment now :-P .

More seriously, I think the coming years maybe the first time in the last century or so that an iron fisted autocracy becomes the dominant economic power in the world. Interesting times ahead.

grandalf7• 16 years ago

Thankfully Google has announced that it will be furthering the anti-censorship cause by hosting a Wikileaks server.

dsplittgerber10• 16 years ago

This certainly speaks for itself and is a drastic measure. Be aware of a strong anti-chinese bias in the general US media, though. James Fallows (spent some years in China as senior editor for The Atlantic and has written lots of articles about China) has often argued that it's not as extreme of a picture as is often presented in the mainstream media. The Chinese government has relaxed quite a topics of regulation in the last years (e.g. introduced some kind of property laws for farmers, for the first time ever) and it can be argued that they have indeed helped several hundred million people rise out of extreme poverty, the most in the world. China is just really intend on tightly controlling a few important parts of society, public opinion being one of them. Chinese society in general can probably be said to place more importance on getting out of poverty and growing into materialism than fighting for individual rights with a 'dubious material value' to them.

smallblacksun• 16 years ago

I'm not going to applaud China for being ever so slightly less evil than they used to be.

dsplittgerber10• 16 years ago

You could applaud them for helping several hundred million people get out of extreme poverty, a grand social experiment if there ever was one. I know it's easy to take the moral high ground here, just think about if any other country recently has accomplished something remotely similar. You probably cannot accomplish such a feat by going from socialism to capitalism in a day (simplified).

Perceval4• 16 years ago

>Be aware of a strong anti-chinese bias in the general US media

That's what's valuable about this leak. It's not just a Western journalist's subjective, emotional assessment of the state of Chinese politics. It's Chinese politics written by Chinese politicians in their own words, and the leak was made by the Chinese not Westerners. Bias doesn't enter into the reporting.

maxklein4• 16 years ago

Sometimes people ask me: why do you support China? My answer is this: Every economic development has been accompanied by huge misery and death. In Africa, South America, India, etc. When you stop shaking hands with the upper class business men and go live with the poor, you'll understand suffering.

I prefer that the people lose a bit of freedom, but they have to suffer less. Those who disagree - at least be sure you have once actually been in that situation. Don't live your life in comfort and then forget that this thing you demand called freedom of speech also has always meant people dying in the streets.

You are the people that would have said in Rwanda: don't block the radio stations calling for people to be murdered - speech should be free.

I've been in Africa, I've been in China, I've been in South America, in the U.S and in Europe. I've seen the dead people, I've hung around with freedom loving geeks, I've talked to favela children. And after all that, I have chosen that I prefer that the people get educated and rich at the expense of free speech.

I'd much rather see a blocked website than dead child.

plinkplonk4• 16 years ago

"I'd much rather see a blocked website than dead child."

False Dichotomy.

The Chinese Communist party came to and maintained power over millions of people killed for ideological reasons. Dissidents are still killed for daring to think differently. Every dictatorship and autocracy warns of chaos and unpeakable bad things that will happen if its benevolent "guidance" and secret police and gulags are set aside and people could believe and speak as their consciences dictate . And some fools buy into this sophistry and support them to avoid a hypothetical violent future. It helps when you are profiting off such oppression somehow (say, by feeding off artificially depressed wages and currency and being chummy with the opressors)

Nice rhetorical trick with Rwanda radio ;-)

maxklein4• 16 years ago

The party in china does not kill people. You say it does, but there are no reports saying that. You've just bought into propaganda.

Talk about the present day (2000+) party, not about the past. Because if we're talking about the past, the EU killed millions of people in gas chambers, and the US divided people by the color of their skin and condemmed those with the wrong color to permanent slavery.

I have SEEN the chaos that the freedom you want has caused. The chinese mode of non-freedom has not caused that.

Let me give you just a little example: In India people are burnt to death for being witches or for theft. This does not happen in china.

There is real violence in most developing countries of the world. In china, there is very little violence. If the country were loosened up, there WILL be violence.

So, just observing the present, the chinese system is the system that has the least violence. And that's why I support it.

If you want that freedom, are YOU going to go live in the midst of the violence? Or do you just want to condemn people to it, while you sit at your computer?

poutine• 16 years ago

While I cannot forgive the Chinese regime for their methods, there is a point here that shouldn't be so quickly downvoted. China has raised 400 Million people out of poverty in the last several decades.

kilps• 16 years ago

I'm still yet to see a convincing reason why those people could not have been brought out of poverty while there was freedom of speech at the same time.

echaozh• 16 years ago

I am able to support billions of cells inside me. Everyone who lives can be proud of that.

Doing what one must do is not something that's worth bragging about. Especially when they didn't quite do that: free speech is more a must have than optional.

elai2• 16 years ago

Taiwan is your counter-example.

maxklein4• 16 years ago

Singapore is my counter example to your Taiwan.

papachito• 16 years ago

> Every economic development has been accompanied by huge misery and death.

From Peru here. The country used to be extremely poor, we're now doing ok, not great but ok with 9.2% of GDP growth (2008 est.) and freedom of speech is pretty great (totally uncensored internet and press) and we're still alive!

ankeshk• 16 years ago

Are you saying that the Chinese government could reduce poverty quicker BECAUSE they restricted freedom of speech?

lhuang• 16 years ago

He is saying that the Chinese government has been able to reduce poverty quicker that usual by taking a heavier controlling hand.

jerf• 16 years ago

"Don't live your life in comfort and then forget that this thing you demand called freedom of speech also has always meant people dying in the streets."

[citation needed]

Free speech doesn't kill people. Government propped up by unfree speech kill people.

Your attempt to casually link free speech to being poor boggles my mind. The country with the strongest free speech protections in the world (historically, anyhow) is also the richest. In an increasingly information-driven economy, free speech is going to be an inextricable part of being a wealthy country.

Blocking free speech is the path to serfdom, not wealth.

Radio stations broadcasting exhortations to kill are a terrible example. I'd bet $10 that was government speech. I'd bet another $10 that the government would not permit anybody from the class they want to kill to rebut, either. Free speech is not a government-mandated message; free speech is a robust debate. Come reply to me and tell me that you heard a robust debate and I'll admit I was wrong, but if all you heard was one side, that's a classic example of unfree speech.

And you are being sold a line which others will happily use to hang you, if you are so willing to sacrifice liberty for security.

yannis• 16 years ago

Here is another view:

http://translate.google.com/translate?js=y&prev=_t&h...

and here is a Chinese view http://translate.google.com/translate?js=y&prev=_t&h...

that Google's departure will be bad for Baidu advocating that with Google's departure Baidu will have less competition and hence will not evolve properly.

I picked up the links above randomly from my wife's computer (she is Chinese).

I do not support any repressive regime, but I also have reservations for Google. There is a huge propaganda machine in China and a more subtle one in the USA, either we like it or not.

BrandonM• 16 years ago

Those instructions read eerily like a passage of 1984, namely the parts where workers are getting instructions on how to rewrite history to portray the State in an infallible, beneficial light.

netcan3• 16 years ago

What struck me was the opposite, like raquo pointed out elsewhere: this is eerily non-Orwellian.

Virtually no euphemisation, no wink-wink double-think. No figure it out yourself using your subtle semi-conscious understanding of the party philosophy. This is strangely conscious and straightforward, cold.

I wonder what Orwell would have had to say about this.

tjgabbour• 16 years ago

I've seen things like that in the west... for example, in the corporate world, they're often straight to the point about disciplined damage control. Which might not sound so bad, except that corporations are so omnipresent that the media is dominated by them. (Like with this Washington Post article; both the advertisers and the media company are corpoate.) So by an analogy, I guess it feels kind of like working for a really big corporation, where everyone knows you're basically supposed to say what the bosses want, refined by specialized PR organs. (One where they don't merely control the government; they ARE the government.)

Maybe China's censors get to work in pleasant offices, and have incentives like climbing the job ladder, more luxuries and status, greater pay if they move to the private sector, etc. Some might be ideologues, others cynical; maybe most just treat it like a job and they're just cogs who kind of know better but are too comfortable where they are, like the people I know about working on facial recognition for CCTV systems.

But yeah, the Chinese system is a lot cruder. The cost of disobedience isn't just losing your job and healthcare; it can be jail, maybe worse.

adrianwaj4• 16 years ago

"3. All websites please clean up text, images and sound and videos which attack the Party, State, government agencies, Internet policies with the excuse of this event."

"4. All websites please clean up text, images and sound and videos which support Google, dedicate flowers to Google, ask Google to stay, cheer for Google and others have a different tune from government policy."

-- attacking government perceived as dirty, so must be cleaned up. So too is cheering Google, and must likewise be cleaned up. How sick.

yumraj• 16 years ago

And I thought we all were still living in the 21st century.

I wonder if this is how it is in mainland China, what it must be like in Tibet..

cglee• 16 years ago

Reading the comments here, I was expecting worse. It's funny that this reminds of a very typical corporate memo.

code_duck• 16 years ago

I wonder what sort of guidelines political parties in the US send to their friends in newspapers?

davidmurphy• 16 years ago

The Wall Street Journal's front page interview of Sergey Brin is a must-read if you haven't already seen it.

China has "made great strides against poverty and whatnot," Mr. Brin said. "But nevertheless, in some aspects of their policy, particularly with respect to censorship, with respect to surveillance of dissidents, I see the same earmarks of totalitarianism, and I find that personally quite troubling."

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870426650457514...

I gotta say, Sergey Brin has my total respect right now.

btw0• 16 years ago

As a citizen of this country and can't do anything on this, I feel SAD.

y0ghur7_xxx• 16 years ago

Probably you will not be able to read this site any longer.

China's instructions on reporting on Google

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